I’ve wanted to experiment with screen printing for a long time and today I finally did some. It was pretty mucky work, but good fun. I printed a design on to a t-shirt and on to a few cards.
Here’s my decapitated body to give you an idea of how the t-shirt came out.
I should have done another pass of the ink, but I didn’t realise at the time and once I’d picked up the screen to check that was the end of that.
The cards took the ink far more happily, of course, but I was guessing at location and they weren’t fixed down, so there was some smudging.
Key lessons I’ve learnt:
- do two passes on t-shirts
- to make postcards, stick down a few and work out where the screen should go before starting
- put newspaper down so you don’t have to be so careful about not getting ink on your table
- have a scrap cloth or something to hand so it’s easy to wipe ink off your hands if necessary
- for multiple t-shirts, you need to get them all ready first on bits of card or something, so you can work through them. There isn’t really time to do that once the ink is on the screen.
I did this just using some greaseproof paper cut out for the template. It worked pretty well, but I suspect most of the designs I want to do will be better with two colours and that will have to be far less haphazard.